The Value of Downvoting, or, How Hacker News Gets It Wrong

First, I should apologize for my misunderstanding. I do feel like a doofus for not realizing that downvotes are possible on HN. But I swear I have never seen a single downvoted post any time I’ve visited! I am a very occasional HN user, mostly a lurker, and my karma is not even 2 digits. :)

In my defense:

1) There's definitely an element of "if the user can’t find it, the feature doesn't exist" with downvoting here.

2) In practical terms, downvotes are so extraordinarily rare on HN that they almost don’t exist.

Anyway, I'm encouraged that downvotes exist on HN, but the threshold could be considered so absurdly high that they're nerfed into oblivion.

I don't want to start a dogpile, since you already admittedly feel like a doofus, but what's up with writing an article about "what's wrong with Hacker News" when you clearly don't have enough experience with Hacker News to have a clue about what's right with it and what's wrong?

See my response to the first PG comment, along with related comments below. Downvotes do exist (mea culpa), but are so nerfed as to be effectively useless -- that's part of the reason I never saw them.

And they don't exist for article submissions, which is problematic for all the same reasons I listed in the blog entry.

they are not "effectively useless", they just useless by you, a non participant / browser of the site.

Considering I hadn't seen a single negative voted comment in a few dozen visits to HN, I'd say they're at the very least underutilized. Although I did notice that a few people went out of their way to vote down stuff in this thread. Ironic? :)